


Little Werewolf in the Big Woods

by persuna



Series: The smallest werewolf [3]
Category: Pod Save America (RPF)
Genre: Hunting, Hurt/Comfort, I don't think this cuddling is platonic, Werewolves, but it's hard to say
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-28
Updated: 2018-05-28
Packaged: 2019-05-15 00:28:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14780162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/persuna/pseuds/persuna
Summary: In which the Crooked Media & Spouse retreat to the deepest, snowiest woods of California does not go as planned.





	Little Werewolf in the Big Woods

**Author's Note:**

> We're getting closer to a puppy pile, but not much else.

Sometimes when people said things like, “I’ve never really pegged you as the outdoorsy type,” Lovett felt a quiet triumph that he had so successfully tricked everyone into thinking he was just like them. Other times, it felt like a rebuke. Like he was the kind of person who was so good at hiding his true self that no one really knew him, or maybe even that his friends and colleagues didn’t care enough to remember his basic fucking biology. 

Times like that Lovett got defensive and snappy and ended up on a five day Crooked Media & Spouse retreat to the deepest, snowiest woods of California.

 

At least, it started as five days. By the time the snowstorm of the century had finished its unexpected sweep through the mountains, sealing off all the roads off for god knows how long, it was day eight, and the two days of extra food that they had brought had started to look like the rankest arrogance. 

They sat round the kitchen table, the few unlabelled tins that a thorough scouring of the kitchen cupboards had turned up, the even scanter remains of their gourmet camp food, and a lengthening, painful silence between them. The phone lines were down, cell reception could not be found in walking distance and even if it could, the roads out were all impassable. In short, things were looking grim.

Lovett shared his friends’ sense of dread, but it was not starvation on his mind. He looked round the table at Tommy’s pale, carefully blank face, Favs’ openly worried frown and Emily’s hands clenched tight around her mug of hot water and felt abruptly ashamed at himself for having let it get this far. He toed off his shoes and socks and stood up. 

“Right, well, I’ll just go out and get something then,” he said. He kept his tone breezy, because that was the only way he was going to be able to play this off.

Favs looked at him like he was the first one on the ship to succumb to space madness. “Lovett, what are you…” his voice trailed off when Lovett grabbed the bottom of his hoodie and pulled it off over his head. 

“What does it look like I’m doing? As the only one of us with any natural resources I’m going out there to murder some poor defenceless woodland creatures, who are already having a hard winter, so that none of you pampered urbanites have to eat expired condensed soup. Then I am absolutely not doing any cooking or washing up for the rest of this trip, possibly ever.” Lovett unlocked the back door and pushed it slightly ajar, so that the smell of cold and snow on the air could start to wake up his wolf.

“Lovett,” said Tommy, looking less blank and more worried, “it’s about minus thirty degrees out there, and you don’t even like cooking raw chicken”.

“I am the king of the fucking jungle,” replied Lovett heatedly. “Nature bows before me and I always carry a fur coat. Anyone who doesn’t want an eyeful turn away.”

Favs was still looking a little stunned, but Emily gripped his shoulder and turned him around. Tommy gave Lovett a long, confusing look which Lovett tried to return in kind, even though he had no idea what the fuck it was supposed to mean. Eventually, Tommy too turned around, and Lovett shoved his jeans and boxers down, let the wolf flow outward, and shot off into the bright white outside.

 

Trails were sparse, buried under days of driving snow and ice, so Lovett could barely keep from yowling in triumph when he caught the edge of a rabbit trail. He followed the scent, nose brushing so close to the snow that it was nearly numb by the time he found the rabbit’s home. It blinked up at him, trembling and pressed flat with terror, and Lovett saw a soft little nose twitching behind it. Five soft little baby rabbit noses. The memory of Tommy’s face, schooled into NSC stillness, nearly drove him to snap his jaws around the rabbit, but instead he backed out of the burrow. Those babies would barely be an appetiser anyway.

The sun was still high in the sky, but Lovett was starting to despair, starting to picture turning up at the back door to hopeful expectant faces and nothing but empty hands or five dead baby rabbits to show them, when he caught another scent. A deer this time, the trail so strong and obvious, a thick line cutting through the woods, that he wondered how he ever missed it. 

When he saw the buck he realised the strength of the scent was proportional to its size. It was at least four times as tall as him if you counted its huge fucking antlers, which Lovett really, really did. 

It lifted its head as if it sensed some malevolent force looming. Lovett took a moment to recall Favs’ soft, worried eyes when Emily had insisted she wasn’t that hungry that morning and leapt for its throat. 

 

Before and during the terrifying fight to the death that he had sought out, Lovett had thought that killing the animal would be the hardest part. He had not yet tried dragging a two hundred pound deer god knows how far through the woods using only his mouth. He thought he might have been able to lift it as a human, but he knew that he needed his fur to last the trip back. So Lovett clenched his teeth around the scruff of the stupid animal’s long neck, cooling blood and tacky fur irritating between his teeth and filthy antlers scraping painfully at his side, and dragged the damn thing. It was slow going. By the time Lovett smelled the cabin again the light was turning grey and any traces of fight induced adrenaline were long gone, leaving his body feeling weak and shaky. 

He pulled the carcass up to the back door and finally unlocked his aching jaw from its neck. Scraping his tongue on the snow helped a bit with the fetid taste of never-washed animal fur in his mouth, but the smears of red he left on the snow brought home what a mess he must be.

Rather than turning back into a human, he scratched at the back door. Footsteps approached rapidly and Tommy flung it open. Lovett dashed past him, hoping Tommy hadn’t got a good look at him, and ran for the bathroom. Thankfully, it was unoccupied, and Lovett was able to transform and push the door shut before anyone spoke to him. 

Normally Lovett’s human form came naturally to him, but it was momentarily hard to hold on to it as the taste of blood and unwashed fur became even more repulsive to his human tastebuds. His stomach churned and he retched, clutching onto the sink for support. And to think, this was most of his family’s idea of a good time. 

Avoiding looking in the mirror, Lovett stepped into the shower. The water burned almost painfully as it hit his skin, and he realised how cold he had been. He tried not to take in how rusty looking the water flowing down the drain was.

It took long enough under the hot water to feel clean, and brush his teeth three times, that it was starting to get less hot, but eventually Lovett turned off the shower and stepped out. He must have been even more out of it than he thought, because someone had left clean clothes neatly folded in the bathroom, and he hadn’t even heard them come in.

Feeling less inhuman once he was free of the stink of blood and wild animal, he braced himself on the sink and leaned in to look at the damage in the mirror. The hot water had awoken a whole load of aches and stings. Werewolf skin was tougher than human skin, and thick fur provided an extra layer of protection, but it was still a long way from armour. The buck had fought for its life, and Lovett was not exactly practiced at taking large wild animals down. Not to mention that, from the trembling feeling in his limbs, he was probably in for some serious muscle aches tomorrow. The most that Lovett’s wolf got up to usually was naps and the occasional play fight with Pundit and Leo. Taking down a buck single handedly and dragging it through the woods had used muscles that Lovett didn’t even know he had. 

It had been intense. Even more so than Lovett had feared. He had thought that it would be disgusting and technically difficult, and boy howdy it had been, but at the crucial moment something inside Lovett had kicked in. An instinct that he had once feared, and later hoped, wasn't in him. Survival instinct maybe. Or bloodlust. The wolf, but as a dangerous animal, not a convenient way to avoid the gym or sleep in small spaces. It hadn't mattered that he'd hung back in all the pack hunts he'd been on as a kid, that he had never killed an animal with nothing but his body before. He had known where to bite and how to dodge and when to go for the throat.

Well, he'd mostly known how to dodge, he conceded, peering morosely at a large graze down his side. 

He forced himself to admit the worst part. On some level, he'd enjoyed it. Not the danger or the close up view of the poor deer's eyes as it died less than an inch from his face, but... winning, perhaps. The physical triumph.

Was he different now? Had he eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and changed his nature forever?

Lovett rolled his eyes at his own reflection. Good to know that he could still be melodramatic. It wasn’t like he was a serial killer now. Taking down a wild animal for food was as sustainable as meat got. Hell, if he told his dad about this Lovett would make him proud for the first time in years. Really personally proud in an arena that his father valued, instead of on a scale that he pretended he appreciated because he had written Lovett off when it came to everything that mattered to him.

It was only Lovett's false ideas about himself that were different. And maybe he'd dispelled some comfortable illusions about cuddly wolves for his closest friends. No big deal.

 

Trying to be quiet, he swung the bathroom open. He'd been in there a while. Hopefully he'd be able to sneak into bed without having to talk to anyone about this, and then in the morning it would be easier for everyone to pretend it never happened.

This excellent plan was scuppered by the fact that Tommy was leaning on the wall across from the bathroom door. Waiting for him.

"I think I chipped a tooth," Lovett said, the complaint coming reflexively before he could reconsider the image of him using those teeth that he might have conjured, "and I used up all the hot water," he added, for cover.

He felt nervous in a way he hadn't since those first few weeks at the White House. Shaky inside. Like he'd got too drunk at a party and made a terrible spectacle of himself. Like his friends only liked him because of an implausible bet. Like he’d said too much.

“Jesus Lovett,” said Tommy. Lovett’s first thought as Tommy stepped over to him was of Tommy pushing him back out the door to sleep in the woods with all the other wild animals. But when he got close Tommy put a gentle hand on Lovett’s face, barely touching a tender spot where the buck’s antlers had just missed taking his eye out. 

“Well I was in a fight to the death recently. You should see the other guy.”

“We can hardly miss him,” said Tommy wryly, “how the hell did you even reach that thing’s throat, let alone carry it?”

It was perfectly normal banter, but Lovett’s mind was blank of responses. All his emotions felt very close to the surface. 

"I don't suppose any of you city slickers know what to do with a whole dead animal," he said instead, trying to sound playfully combative, hitting somewhere closer to bitter.

"Don't worry about it," said Favs, appearing from the kitchen. His face seemed a little paler than usual under the golden glow of his unseasonal tan, as if he'd seen some things. "Emily went to some kind of separatist Maine girl guide group where they taught them how to butcher like... cows or something. She's got this." A small but significant crashing noise came from the kitchen. "Ah, but she needs some grunt labor and I am apparently not up to it. Tommy, could you?" he waved his hand vaguely at the kitchen.

"Sure," said Tommy, "Can you-" he tipped his head towards Lovett and kept a hand on his shoulder until Favs nodded and stepped closer, within touching distance.

"I'm tired, not blind to your blatant non-verbal communication," grumbled Lovett under his breath, but he didn't mind. Having someone there had gone from terrifying to necessary. 

Like Tommy, Favs looked Lovett up and down with an uncomfortably inscrutable look, but he didn't say anything, just steered Lovett towards the sitting room, where a very merry fire was going, and sat down on the couch. He looked up at Lovett, expectant, and Lovett couldn't tell what he was meant to do.

"Come here," said Favs when he didn't move.

Lovett wavered, uncertain. It had become almost normal over the years for the wolf to curl up with Favs or Tommy or Emily. It didn't count as weird or inappropriate or creepy to put your head in someone's lap if you were a small(ish) wolf. But as inviting as that sounded, right now Lovett didn't think he could handle letting his other side to the surface, not after giving it so much power. The violence of this evening was still too raw.

"I don't really feel like changing again right now," he said awkwardly, not sure how much he could allude to the cuddling without disrupting whatever no-homo bro code he'd miraculously avoided this far.

"I didn't say change, I said come here," was all Favs said in reply. He patted the cushion right next to him.

Cautiously, Lovett approached the couch. Gingerly, he lowered himself down to sit on it. He sat close to Favs, but not too close. Favs waited patiently throughout this production, a fond look on his face, as if reluctance to snuggle with his male friend while his wife was in the other room was some strange quirk of Lovett's and not like, a real thing. A sea change. It was honestly kind of infuriating, and at a less vulnerable moment Lovett would have called him out on it, but as it was he was exhausted and uncomfortable and deep-down cold in his bones and he really wanted to swing his legs round and lay his head in Favs’ lap, which he knew from experience was firm and warm and comforting and smelled really good. So he did.

Favs did not spring from the couch in disgust at how Lovett had misinterpreted his platonic approaches. He made an approving sort of humming noise and started carding his fingers through Lovett's hair. It was nice. Really nice. So nice that Lovett started to feel a lump rising in his throat. If it reached the top Lovett was pretty sure that he was going to burst into undignified tears, and that was a bridge too far, so instead he opened his mouth to distract them both.

"We probably shouldn't even eat it until tomorrow. And I hope you've appropriately lowered your expectations for this meal. We're talking tough, gritty game that hasn't been hung properly."

"I'm sure it will taste better than the alternative, which is nothing,” replied Favs calmly. He didn't seem to need distracting from the weirdness of petting his business partner.

"We'll see," conceded Lovett. He'd sort of lost track of if he was meant to be rooting for the deer to be gross anyway. That seemed like a counterproductive argument.

Favs was still stroking his hair, and it was still incredibly soothing. For a long time they sat in silence, with only the crackling of the fire in the background.

"I've never killed anything before," said Lovett, apropos of nothing. "I mean like an animal. I've killed insects and probably some mice if you count poison, and I've eaten loads of animals in restaurants, but this isn't a thing I do.”

“I know. And don’t think you're so special. People kill animals all the time. We're known for it. Hunting is one of the national past-times," said Favs, with startling and devastating insight into the very heart of Lovett's fears.

"It's not the same". The lump was back, and Lovett swallowed it down, closed his eyes to try and forestall the sting of tears.

"No, but it doesn't change anything. My wife is in there doing things I've never seen before with a knife and I don't think I'll ever look at her in quite the same way, but I'm not repulsed. It's kind of a turn on knowing I live with a provider."

Lovett got a bit lost down the rabbit hole of Favs sort of comparing him to his wife, and they settled back into companionable silence.

He tensed when Emily and Tommy came in from the kitchen, braced for a shocked or judgemental silence, but they didn't even seem to notice. Emily pulled a blanket off the back of one of the armchairs and slid under Lovett's feet, flicking the blanket over them both. Tommy dragged one of the armchairs closer to the couch and settled down in it, propping his feet up by Favs and giving the whole group on the couch a warm smile.

Surrounded by his most important people, warm and accepted, Lovett didn't feel like a bloodthirsty animal. He'd provided for his pack, and they'd provided for him.

 

Epilogue: Everyone gets thoroughly sick of venison stew and vows never to eat it again, but otherwise they're fine.


End file.
